In the late 1990s, Jeff Lee first started to build his furniture retail empire in Pomona under a circus-sized tent set up off the 71.

Behind his tent was an old aerospace factory surrounded by barbed-wire fence that once employed thousands to manufacture missiles. It was turned into a furniture factory, called Boyd Manufacturing Co. Inc., by his mother’s longtime partner, who helped raise Lee. Lee grew up in the furniture business, working summer jobs in the Boyd factory making oak bedroom sets.

In the tent, he sold clearance items jettisoned by furniture manufacturers. The first three months, Lee slept with a electronic stun gun, then a shotgun tucked under the sofa cushions while guarding the furniture from theft in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood.

Over the next few years, times were good. By 2003, he opened a brick-and-mortar store in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Diamond Bar, then Portland, Ore. – his dream city.

He finally opened Metropolitan Design in Long Beach in 2004 and married his wife, Amber, two years later.

It was the best of times.

Consumers were flush with cash, the real estate markets were humming along, and downtown Long Beach was chasing a dream of a retail mecca loaded up with retailers such as Z Gallerie, Nordstrom Rack and other hip places. These retailers have since bolted from downtown as glitzy restaurants and bars have entered as replacements to form an up-and-coming entertainment district along Pine Avenue.

The city’s efforts to create a higher-density urban zone for people to live in condominiums and luxury apartments became a reality. But the shopping never materialized the way the Lees envisioned. Since the Great Recession, for instance, Metropolitan Design built a robust business from online orders on its website, thefurniturewarehouse.net.

“In the last three or four years, the success of The Promenade helped with the traffic base (of our store) and influx of residents, but there’s been a big push to bring in restaurants and bars,” he said. “We became a destination site.”

More than 50 percent of its sales came from outside California, Lee said. Last year, the business generated about $1.8 million in revenue. Lee forecasts between $1.7 million to $1.9 million this year.

In April, Metropolitan Design left for Bixby Knolls, going from 10,000 square feet of space on The Promenade down to 7,000 at a former furniture store location in Bixby Knolls, at 4310 Atlantic Ave.

“We didn’t feel the love of downtown,” co-owner Amber Lee said. The Lees wanted to buy the building, but the former owner wants to wait.

“We live in Belmont Shore, but this feels like home,” Amber Lee said.

In March, the Lees had a 10-day window to get out of the old store and move into the new one in Bixby Knolls.

Metropolitan Design sells furniture from its floor, but special orders on couches and chairs can be taken where customers select their own fabrics and colors.

Metropolitan Design doesn’t have mega-furniture chain ambitions such as Living Spaces Furniture, Mor Furniture For Less or Jerome’s Furniture, but the Lees do envision expanding to San Diego – where Amber has family roots (Her father, Bob Cluck, is a baseball scout for the Tampa Bay Rays).

They’re thinking coastline community Solana Beach or North Park, a tiny neighborhood northeast of Balboa Park.

“Our next venture, once this gets to where we want, is to open a second store in San Diego,” Jeff Lee said.